Hack 87. Moving Shows Between TiVo Units

   

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Hack 87 Moving Shows Between TiVo Units

Of course you could just extract a television show from one TiVo and insert it into another, but there's an easier way to transfer from one unit to another .

With a growing archive of tmf files on your PC, you can easily shuffle shows from one TiVo to another in your home: The Love Boat in the bedroom, Serpico in the media room, and Blue's Clues in the playroom. Think of the collaborative scheduling possibilities: if two television shows are on at the same time, have one TiVo record one, have another TiVo record the other show, extract the tmf files, and move them about at will. Stock the family TiVo with only family-friendly programming, keeping those X-Files episodes away from your 5-year-old.

There's really no need to FTP extract [Hack #81] files from one TiVo to your PC, only to insert them [Hack #86] into another TiVounless, of course, you want to archive the files in the process. Thanks to an extension of FTP called FXP, you can cross-transfer between two FTP servers, using your FTP client only as the middleman for making the introductions , controlling the connection, and deciding what goes where. No data is ever actually sent to or stored on your PC. Your FTP client simply asks one TiVo to send files to the other, and vice versa. The most popular Windows FTP application, WS_FTP (http://www.ipswitch.com/Products/WS_FTP/index.html) supports FXP transfers quite nicely . Open up two TiVos in two windows , select the tmf file to transfer, drag, and drop. LundFXP (http://www.lundman.net/unix/lundfxp.html) is an FXP client (still in alpha testing at the time of this writing) for Mac OS X, Windows, and Unix variants.

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